Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [51]
When he was fifteen, he stopped asking Anja when he would gain the magic.
Deep inside of him, he already knew the answer.
As the children grew older and stronger, the tasks they performed grew more difficult. Older boys and young men were given hard, physical labor—labor that kept them exhausted and their minds occupied. It was these boys and young men who, it was rumored, were stirring up trouble among the Field Magi, and though the overseer had no cause for complaint among his people, he didn’t intend to play the blind fool, either, as the saying went. Therefore, when it was decided to extend the settlement’s cropland, he assigned the young men the task of clearing the land. The work was strenuous. They had to haul or burn away the underbrush, lift large stones, kill the choking weeds, and there were a hundred other back-breaking tasks. Then the higher-ranking, more privileged Field Magi would come and, with the aid of the Fihanish, the Druids, use their magic to persuade the giant trees to release their roots from the ground and plant themselves elsewhere. After this, the young men had to haul those trees that were dead back to the village where, several times yearly, the Pron-alban sent the winged Ariel to transport the wood back to the city.
All of the physical labors had to be performed by hand. The young men were never given Life by the catalyst to help them in any of these tasks. Even Mosiah, with his natural gift for magic, was generally too worn out to call upon it. This was done purposefully to break the spirits of the young men and mold them into proper, drab Field Magi, like their parents.
As for tools … Once Joram, tired of pushing a huge boulder across the ground, suddenly conceived the idea of taking a stick, placing it under the boulder, and using the leverage of the stick to make the boulder move. He was just thrusting the stick beneath the boulder when Mosiah, with a shocked look, grabbed hold of his arm.
“Joram, what are you doing?”
“Well, what am I doing?” Joram snapped impatiently, flinching away. He did not like people touching him. “I’m moving this rock!”
“You are moving it by giving Life to that stick!” Mosiah said. “You are giving Life to that which has none of its own.”
Joram stared at the stick, frowning. “So?”
“Joram,” whispered Mosiah in awe, “that is what the Sorcerers do! Those who practice the Dark Arts!”
Joram snorted. “You mean the Dark Arts are nothing more than using sticks to move stones? From the way everybody fears them, I thought they must at least sacrifice babies—”
“Don’t talk like that, Joram,” Mosiah remonstrated in hushed tones, glancing about nervously. “They deny the magic. They deny Life. By their Dark Arts, they would destroy it. They almost did destroy it, during the Iron Wars!”
“That’s crazy,” muttered Joram. “Why would they destroy themselves?”
“If they are Dead inside, as some say, then they lose nothing.”
“What do you mean, ‘Dead inside’?” Joram asked in a low voice, not looking at Mosiah, but staring at the boulder through the tangled mass of his black hair that had fallen down over his face.
“Sometimes there are children born without Life,” Mosiah said, glancing at Joram in some surprise. “Didn’t you ever hear about them? I would have thought your mother would have told you—” Mosiah stopped in embarrassment.
“No,” Joram answered in the same low, expressionless voice, though his face went white and his hand clenched around the stick.
Mentally kicking himself for bringing Anja into the conversation, Mosiah continued to talk as he usually did around the silent, unresponsive Joram. “We’re given Tests when we’re born, and sometimes babies fail these Tests, which means they don’t have any Life in them.”
“What happens … to these babies?” Joram asked in such subdued and quiet tones that Mosiah barely heard him.
“The catalysts take them away to the Font,” Mosiah answered, rather startled. Never before had Joram asked a question about anything. “They perform the Deathwatch. Some say that occasionally